RORSCHACH TEST

I took exactly 1 class of psychology in my undergrad (which would be, of course, psych 101) and learned enough to know that the human mind is fascinating and I am well out of my depth trying to discuss it, so anyone who actually knows anything about the subject: forgive my cultural appropriatism here, but I’m going to talk about the Rorschach test.  For those unfamiliar, this test, also known as the “ink-blot” test, involved showing the patient a series of ink blots, asking them the first thing that came to their mind upon seeing them, and using their responses as a method of psychological evaluation.  I’m not going to pretend to understand the nuances of such a process, but if I show one person an ink-blot and that person says “ice cream” and the second person says “arson”, I’m watching that second person a little closer.  But even without the requisite education in psychology, we can learn from this test, primarily in the sense that YOUR first response when presented with an idea can be quite informing of how YOU perceive the world.

Check it out: philosophy, psychology AND chaos all in one shot...and a corndog!

Case in point?  Hard training.  Boom: what did you think?  It’s so amazing how, when I say “hard training”, trainees either stare blankly at me, or ask if I mean “train 6 days a week” or “take every set to failure”.  Right away, your initial response is telling ME that you don’t know how to train hard.  Because, right away, you’re trying to make “hard training” a mechanical process rather than a human one.  You’re trying to set up the parameters OF the training the CREATE hard training, and that’s an artificial construct that simply will not gel with the humanity element at play when we discuss training.  Hard training is training wherein you pour every fiber of your being INTO the training.  “Every set to failure” doesn’t mean that, because I’ve seen how some of you cats “fail” a lift: you had at LEAST 6 more reps in you if you were actually willing to push through the pain.  To say nothing of how, whenever someone says they take “every set to failure”, I know I’ve found a liar.  You mean to tell me that, on 3 sets of squats, for every set, you let the bar crash into the pins, unload all the plates, rack the bar, re-load all the plates, and then do that again for the next set?  No: stop.  And train 6 days a week?  How do I know you’re not training hard?  You can do it SIX DAYS A WEEK.  By the end of Super Squats, I was good for ONE hard workout that week.  But I get people REAL mad when I say this, so let’s move on to nutrition to further alienate my readers.

Ah yes, nutrition.  Did your mind immediately jump to supplements?  Did you think protein powder, weightgainer and creatine?  Notice how these are SUPPLEMENTS?  They’re supposed to augment what is missing from your diet.  What FOOD are you eating?  When you read “food”, did you think “Uber Eats?”  McDonalds?  Did you think frozen dinners?  Did you think of 1500 calorie shakes?  Did you think of ANYTHING that requires actual cooking?  Have you thought of a single vegetable yet?  It baffles me how much time and energy we invest in trying to get trainees to eat like a human.  Cooking doesn’t need to be a 4 hour affair: it can be done quickly, efficiently and effectively, especially with all the modern amenities available these days.  And with the impact of inflation as of the time I’m writing this, there’s no way you can tell me that eating out is cheaper than making something at home.  Nor is it faster.  And this is the stuff you are putting IN YOUR BODY to achieve physical transformation.  Why WOULDN’T you pick stuff that is the closest to real, human food as possible?  Why would you want to transform off of something with an ingredient list that reads like a chemistry paper?  

Oh f**k me: just make a grilled cheese sandwich

And that’s just “food”.  Now what if I say “eating”?  Right away, the calorie and macro calculators come out.  You go about this whole process backwards.  You decide you’re going to eat a certain amount of stuff and that THIS is going to transform you.  The body transforms from demands placed upon it: that’s TRAINING.  That’s the HARD training we just talked about.  The body doesn’t transform from fuel: the fuel FUELS the transformation.  It doesn’t matter if I put premium fuel or canola oil in my truck, nor does it matter if I put in 1 gallon or 50 if I never TURN IT ON.  It’s the same with eating: the eating is there to FUEL the transformation process: not vector it.  When I think “eating”, I think “to recover”.  I just did my write-up of Super Squats and I wrote about how there was literally not a moment of the day I wasn’t eating, because I was CONSTANTLY recovering from the training.  As of this moment, I’m in a deload.  I’m focusing on running and bodyweight work.  I am going hours between meals, and the meals themselves are sparse.  My recovery demand is low.  Yes: I will lose fat as a result of this.  No: this is not a fat loss phase of training.  The training is light because it is necessary to have a lighter training phase after such an INTENSE phase of training.  Oh my goodness, periodization once again.  Let training drive the bus here and you’ll be good: do it backwards and…well…you go backwards.

You can keep going on these tests.  When you hear “strength”, do you think total on the big 3?  Or do you think “ability to impose will”?  Or heck, do you hear strength and think “size”?  When you hear hypertrophy, do you think “bodybuilding”, or do you think “accumulation?”  When you hear “strongman training”, do you think anything, or do you come back with “for WHAT competition?”  You don’t need to be a psychologist to be able to appreciate what these tests reveal to ourselves.  We may end up learning more than we thought we knew.